Protest Banners Workshops

The children of Breightmet wanderers FC junior team recently held a protest march to raise awareness against racism in football and we held a series of workshops to help them make banners to be used.

 Photo courtesy of Bolton at Home

The children worked with one of our community artists to make the banners and then sewable LEDs were added to make the banners even more eye catching.

Banner with yellow LEDs

This idea was based on a new wave of demonstrations that use light as a form of protest, representing awareness, understanding and progression. More information can be found here: http://overpasslightbrigade.org/

Example from Overpass Light Brigade

This project allowed us to use smart materials to represent ideas within a piece of art that serves a function as well as delivering a message, I'm very proud of everyone involved in this fantastic effort.

Photo from the day of the demonstration courtesy of Bolton at Home

Conductive Ink Workshop

I've been very behind with blogging about our fantastic craft and smart materials workshops due to job applications and interviews, and writing journal papers so I have quite a bit to catch up on. So I'm going to try and catch up on blogging over the next couple of days.

One of the workshops we ran was using conductive inks to create circuits on paper. We used the inks to draw connections between LEDs and batteries on the cover of cards.

Using conductive ink to paint circuits and connections is pretty magical however the ink can be very gooey and takes quite a long time to dry. Also it is not possible to test the connection until the ink is completely dry so although it is a fairly easy way to build interesting circuits within paper projects it does take a while to find out if your hard work has paid off.

Here is a small blue LED glowing on shiny green card

As it was a few days before Valentines day some people decided to experiment with the use of the ink and create Valentines cards. We also used pearlescent card to give a shimmering effect. I think if we had more time to experiment and design the cards we could have come up with some really interesting designs but instead we used this session to experiment with the ink to see how it works.